HP Scanjet Pro 2500 f1

Standalone scanning at a price Jam Rhythm An affordable Wi-fi speaker

Now that all-in-one printer/scanner/ copiers are the norm, you don’t see many standalone scanners. Those with document feeders (ADF) are generally very expensive and limited to scanning multiple single sheets. The Scanjet Pro 2500 f1 is quite pricey, but it lets you swing up the ADF and place materials directly on the scanning glass, so you can digitise thicker content like book pages or small artworks.

With no Wi-fi or Ethernet features, you’ll need to connect the scanner directly to a PC or Mac via USB, which is fine, because it’s rarely convenient to scan remotely anyway. It looks much like the top section of an all-in-one printer, and works like one too. But at a claimed 20 pages per minute, and with the ability to scan both sides of the paper simultaneously without slowing down, it’s faster than most. We didn’t quite hit that speed, but we weren’t far off. A more complicated 16-side job took two minutes 47 seconds at a usable 200 dots per inch (dpi). When using the glass, we found it was possible to accidentally tuck a book under the bezel when trying to push it flush against the edge, but otherwise there were no problems.

HP’S scanning software is annoyingly basic, and won’t detect which way round pages ought to be making it more hassle to deal with longer documents. But we got sharp scans up to 1200dpi, with reasonably accurate colour, although this device wouldn’t be your first pick for photo scanning.